


Train We Ride

by maplemood



Series: To Everything There is a Season [2]
Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Aging, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fatherhood, Kid Fic, Marriage, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, Mythology References, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 00:15:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18905563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: Promises to her he’s broken often enough, though less so these past couple years. Promises to their daughter he breaks only when he has to.





	Train We Ride

“Momma!”

Too early for that. Much too early. “Mmm?”

“Momma—”

Reluctantly, she cracks an eyelid. The slight figure dancing from foot to foot at the side of the bed blocks most of her view, but even so she can tell that the morning light slanting in through the window doesn’t deserve its name yet, being more blue than bright. Must be hardly past the cock-crow of dawn, if that. Persephone yawns. “What time is it?”

“Time enough.”

Of all the fool—“Baby. You ain’t answering my question.”

The figure quits dancing and casts Persephone the most pleading look she figures five-year-old eyes can muster. “There’s frost outside.”

“I know. I can smell it.” Up here on top they don’t call her Our Lady of the Wintertime for nothing. “Give me the hour, chickadee.”

Her daughter starts to hop. One foot to the other, one foot to the other. Her gaze skips away from Persephone’s. “Six o’clock,” she says. “About.”

“About. Near about or just about?”

“Just.”

Persephone huffs. “Well then.”

_“Momma.”_

“Your daddy knows I ain’t an early riser,” she says, plumping herself back down and tugging the quilt up to her chin. The mattress creaks, squealing springs digging into all her boniest parts and goose down puffing from the worn seams, collecting under the bedsheets like clods of snow. Still, the quilt’s warm. Warm, heavy as Persephone’s eyes, and more inviting by far than the dim, frost-tinged air of her bedroom. She yawns again. “We got time,” she assures, knowing the girl won’t be much assured.

One foot to the other. “Granny D says you got up early all the time before I was born.”

“Did she.”

“‘Cause you had to, ‘cause you were a farm girl.” Foot to the other, foot to the other. Now the floorboards are creaking.

“‘Cause I had to,” echoes Persephone. “Did your granny tell you I made a terrible farm girl?”

The hopping stops with one last almighty _thump_ that sets an ache pounding in her left temple. “No.”

“Ask her. You think I would’ve run off with your daddy if I liked getting up before dawn every day to feed the chickens?” Sighing, Persephone hoiks up on one elbow and lifts a corner of the quilt. “Come on in,” she says. “We got time.”

Girl eyes the warm depths beneath without looking the least bit tempted. “I want to go home,” she says, just this side of a whine, her bottom lip jutting out sulkily.

Lord, but Persephone doesn’t have time for this. There’s packing still to be done, goodbyes still to be said, and the chill of winter right around the corner, already boring its way into her joints like the rheumatism her ma so often complains of. “I’ll tell you a story,” she coaxes. “Only ‘till Granny calls us down for breakfast, how about that?”

Her daughter hesitates. Says, “He’s coming today?” like she should’ve known to get the promise in writing.

“‘Course he is.” The girl’s beginning to take the weight and measure of her daddy’s promises too soon, all too soon, and where will they be when she realizes...stop. Too early for that now, either. Persephone pats the mattress, scoots backwards. “Get on up here before I change my mind.”

Truth be told, she’s never thought herself a storyteller; in five years she’s learned that whatever you think yourself, good or bad, doesn’t make much difference where kids are concerned. Make you over in their own image, they do, and ‘cause the girl’s got a powerful love of tall tales—like most her age, Persephone figures—it follows that her ma should have the chops to spin them.

This time, though, she ain’t asking for anything particularly tall. “Tell me how Daddy H picked my name,” she says, wriggling under the quilt and curling there tense as a spring.  

“That’s all?” Persephone asks without thinking. She clears her throat, settles back on her side. “All right then. All right.” Cold’s crept into the bed along with her daughter. It tingles from the girl’s toes, from her fingers twitching out to tangle with Persephone’s. She mewls impatiently when Persephone scoops an entire palm up to chafe between the two of her own, blowing on each chilled finger in turn. “Hush. You almost didn’t get a name, you know that. Your daddy and I couldn’t decide, and once we decided we couldn’t agree…”

“Makaria.” The girl repeats her name once the story’s told in full and tied neat into a bow. “It’s mine,” she says, proud as if she had a hand in the picking. “It’s perfect.”

“Sure is,” Persephone agrees. She stretches out with a groan. “Sometimes I still forget you have it, mind.”

“That’s why you call me baby.”

“I call you baby ‘cause you’re my baby.” The ache in her temple’s let up. Not the aching in her joints, of course; light from the window’s finally brightened some, yellow and crisp with a wintery edge to it. “All you were those first couple weeks.”

“U-uh. Daddy H knew. He knows everything,” Makaria says, with more faith than Persephone knows either her daddy or her ma has ever warranted. She scrambles up suddenly, one foot catching Persephone in the ribs, her hair haloed coppery in the light. “Come on, Momma!” Her feet swing off the edge of the bed, urgent. “Get up, get _up.”_

***

Funny thing is, Demeter hollers up the stairs not a minute later, “Girl! Makaria! Daylight’s wasting.” Makaria, naturally, disappears like a flash in the pan. Persephone hears her tread, awful heavy for a kid who doesn’t yet match the weight of a good-sized dog, bang down the stairs and directly into the kitchen while she heaves upright and reaches for her shawl. By the time she shuffles into the kitchen herself the girl’s chomping on a bit of toast, gabbling something about the chickens.

“You, keep an eye on the coffee,” Demeter says, not turning to spare a glance for Persephone. “You—” Makaria demolishes the last of her toast with a belch “—mind your manners and get your coat. And your boots. And if there’s a crust on their water, be sure and break it up real good.”

“Where’d you put that dress Aunt Hestia sent her?” Persephone asks as soon as the back door slams shut. “I need to pack it up.”

“The checkered one?” Demeter slides beside her at the stove, poking a fork into strips of bacon starting to sizzle in the frying pan. “Kind of plain for your husband’s taste, ain’t it?”

“Kind of.” Everything’s plain for his taste unless it happens to be frothed with lace or edged in gold, or at least cut from the kind of top-quality, fine-woven fabric tough to come by in farming country. Persephone says no more, her ma knows well enough. “Hades knows the girl’s no fashion plate.”

“Does he,” says Demeter, the curve of her smile softer than it’s been in years past, if not soft. “How much jam are you taking?” she asks. “Five jars of the strawberry or six of the peach?”

“Six of the peach.” They canned a batch twice the size of their usual this year. Ares’ girl Alcippe came down with her two little boys to help; Persephone had a time showing the boys and Makaria how to peel and slice the peaches, skin fuzzed on one side and sticky-slick on the other lopping from their knives in clumsy strips. _Careful, go slow. You too,_ _Makaria._ They seemed young for it, sucking the juice off their fingers and gobbling as many peaches as they sliced, but she remembers doing the same when she was their age. Younger, even. _Country girl,_ Demeter used to say, _you gotta learn your way around a knife._

“Take a jar of the honey, too,” she says now as she pokes the bacon.

“Don’t care for it.” A teasing edge creeps into Persephone’s voice. She crosses the kitchen for the coffee mugs.

“Girl, I know _you_ don’t,” Demeter snaps. “And I know the grandbaby don’t, either,” she adds, precious little real heat in her words, like she guesses Persephone’s hiding a grin.

She is. “Thank you kindly, Mama. I know that stung.”

“He always did have a sweet tooth.” Demeter sets down the fork. “I think because we got so little, you know—”

“I know, Ma.” Same as she knows Demeter doesn’t like to talk about the mess of their younger years, Daddy Cronus mean as a snake, Momma Rhea kind as she could be despite him, which wasn’t very, their whole passel of kids growing up crammed together and miles apart for all that. Persephone’s searching for a different topic, a way to turn the conversation without seeming as she’s meaning to, when, reaching into the cupboard for the mugs, she looks out the kitchen window and sees Makaria spinning like a fool down by the coop, something clutched in her hands. “Lord,” she mutters, heads for the door. The screen sticks open with a rusty squeak. “Girl! What do you think you’re doing?”

Her daughter stumbles to a stop, almost lurching into the coop. She waves a stick, and bobbling on the stick by a hole melted through its middle, the round of ice off the chickens’ water.  

“Come inside,” Persephone calls. Makaria’s coat flutters open over her nightie. One of her boots is missing. “You’ll catch a chill.”

Behind her, Demeter says, “Not while the bacon finishes up.”

She rolls her eyes. “Ma—”

“She won’t be tearing up my garden again ‘till next spring, Persephone. Let the girl live a little.”

“‘Live a little?’” Persephone mimics. “Ain’t that what Aunt Hera told you? Three weeks before Hades and I got down to business in your garden, wasn’t it?”

Demeter snorts. “The only business she’ll be getting down to is mud pies.”

“In the cold.”

“No colder than down below.”

Like she’s had her ears pricked to the whole thing Makaria, who ain’t budged an inch, shouts, “Did Granny D say I could stay outside?”

Persephone shakes her head. They’re of the same mind, her ma and her girl, and days like this it makes her a sight gladder to be headed underground, where Hades can usually be counted on to stand by her decisions, or at least pretend he’s done so ‘till Persephone’s left the room. “Five minutes!”

“It’ll take six for the bacon to crisp,” Demeter says. “Girl?”

“What?”

“Coffee’s about ready to scald.”

***

Persephone and Makaria dress in the kitchen, in front of the stove, owing to the chill still lingering in the upstairs rooms. Last year Persephone would’ve spread her compact, brushes, and pots out on the table, let Makaria fool around with the lipsticks while she put on her face. This year she left off packing ‘till the last minute, and so she doesn’t bother with her face, just hustles into the old green standby and all but bullies her daughter into the black lace frock made special for Makaria’s last birthday. “Your daddy loves to see you in it.”

“It’s tight.”

“Is it now. Still breathing, ain’t you?” Stooping, Persephone buttons up the front and swats away fidgeting fingers. “Baby, wear it this last time, that’s all I’m asking.” Makaria is growing out of it, except the frock’s getting more short than tight—its filmy skirt hardly covers her knees. “You can change into Auntie Hestia’s dress as soon as we get home.”

“Soon as?”

“Not a minute before. Go get your stockings.”

It’s the beginning of a lather lasting the whole morning long: Persephone folds frocks and slips and nighties, tucking them into the suitcases side-by-side before giving up the folding halfway through and stuffing whatever’s left wherever it’ll fit. Makaria pounds upstairs and downstairs, dithering over which three toys she should bring on the train (as if she ain’t got an entire playroom waiting for her down in the palace) and begging Persephone to hurry up every chance she gets. Demeter stays in the kitchen, mostly, stacking jars of jam and jars of honey, and jars of the marmalade Hades likes about as well as the honey, in brown paper bags. “Gotta get Hermes to bring you all some apple butter. The apples’ll ripen up real nice this fall.”

“Granny D—”

“In the corner, baby.”

“Ma—”

“Persephone, how should I know? Check in the parlor.”

Likely the train will roll into the station by noon. Hades’ comings and goings ain’t ever exact, no matter how hard he’s tried to make them so since Makaria’s birth. There’s always one thing or another jacked up in the factories, old as they are, with the forges constantly burning and the workers as apt to grow clumsy as they are to pull double shifts. Always one thing or another needing to be checked over in the accounts, and besides all that Persephone knows her husband’s feeling the bite of age sharper than she is. He ain’t so able, these days, to rise at the crack of dawn and shrug off the aches in his bones. But he does come. Before the day’s end he’ll be here; he promised.

Promises to her he’s broken often enough, though less so these past couple years. Promises to their daughter he breaks only when he has to.

“Momma, did you see my train?” Makaria means the play one she and Hades rigged out of matchboxes and old thread spools last time he visited, in July—they spent hours on it, talking shop like a pair of engineers over a blueprint, Makaria fumbling to pass him the smallest spools, the ones Hades would glue down with his steadier fingers. “Where’s my train?”

“Looked under your bed yet?” Persephone asks. The suitcases are finally packed full and forced shut, the brown paper bags of jam and honey loaded into Makaria’s miniature wagon. Better to get this circus on the road sooner rather than later, seeing as there’s a possibility, however slim, that the girl will work most of her energy out on the way to the station instead of on the train. Anyhow, the weather’s fine. Warmed up more than she figured it would, and Persephone hopes to enjoy the best of it before heading home for another winter.

“Under my bed?” Makaria says, eyes rolling like the idea’s pure foolishness. Like she’s never forgotten one thing beneath her bed before.

“Look,” Persephone orders. Then, ‘cause some of the girl’s antsiness has worked its way into her at last, “Quick. You want to miss the train?”

Makaria darts upstairs in a flurry of black lace.

***

The summer after she turned two the baby started to talk, long, unformed gushes of sticky babble somehow making their way to words, or close to words. _Ma_ when Persephone woke her in the morning, scooped Makaria out of her crib and blew raspberries on her belly. _Wa-wa_ when she got her bath or waddled to the edge of the duck pond on unsteady legs, _up_ when she wanted just about anything, from a goodnight kiss to her breakfast to a sharply glittering pair of garden shears. Some words Persephone tried to keep her from saying, tried saving for a more convenient time. A time when he could be the first to hear them, but that summer Hades didn’t visit up top ‘till August, and by then Persephone’s efforts were good and wasted.

“I figured it was better than scaring her out of saying it at all,” she told him, knowing she sounded more accusing than guilty and wishing it could’ve worked out differently. Demeter was away that night, up on the mountain thanks to Uncle Zeus and Aunt Hera’s latest set-to; Hades and Persephone had the old zinc wash tub set up in the kitchen for Makaria’s bath.

“Wa-wa!” She’d never been afraid of it the way Persephone remembered some of her baby cousins being. Makaria plunked one fat fist into the water and squealed at the splash. She grabbed for the wooden boat Hades handed her and, giggling, poked at the tattooed bricks inked over his arm. Persephone wondered if she remembered seeing him with his sleeves rolled up before.

She knew better than to wonder if Makaria remembered _him_ —which wasn’t to say she didn’t. Train settled to a stop at the platform that morning, the two passengers disembarking, and her baby had screeched, “Da!” Of course, Hermes had looked a mite less thrilled to hear that now that Hades stood right beside him. He’d half-finished an especially smooth lie when Persephone interrupted him.

“Don’t get too bent out of shape. She calls the goats Da, too.”

And the oldest porter at the station. And Hector, the kid manning the fruit stand for Demeter that summer. And a scrawny bluetick coonhound sunning itself outside the general store. In fact, Persephone had been sure by the time they made it back to the house that there wasn’t a man or animal in the county Makaria wouldn’t call Da, excepting her own father.

“Wa—”

“Hush, baby, I gotta do your hair.” Upending a tin cup over Makaria’s head, Persephone shaded the girl’s eyes with her free hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, glancing up at Hades. It was a problem she couldn’t rightly have helped, no more than she could help her guilt over it.  

“It’s not your fault,” he answered, a little absently. Hades held his hand out to Makaria. A smile flickered over his face when she grasped at his thick fingers with her slippery ones.  

“Well,” said Persephone, “ _I_ don’t want her calling you the same name she calls the goats. Or Hermes, for that matter.”

“Up! Up!”

“So have her call me something else.”

“Really?” Persephone looked at her husband a long minute. “What you got in mind?”

“We could try—” he frowned, probably paging back through an index stored in his head; Hades has always given more thought to names and titles “—Daddy H, something like that. So she’ll know the difference.”

“Up!”

“All right! I hear you,” Persephone huffed. Her knees popped as she straightened. “Would you dry her off for me? I forgot the nightie and the comb upstairs.”

It had taken something out of him, she knew, shrugging off her apology. Persephone had seen the way his face tightened at the station. But just now she’d seen him smile, that same face opening as Makaria reached for him, and coming back down the stairs, comb in one hand, tiny feedsack nightgown in the other, she heard them both, Hades’ low rumble and the baby’s excited burbling.

“Hey! Hey!” Makaria’s tongue, quick as it already was, couldn’t quite master “H.”

“That’s it,” said Hades. He sounded, Persephone thought, mellow, almost easy, like she never could be with the baby. Smooth as bathwater, warm as the lamplight gleaming off Makaria’s damp hair as he toweled it dry. “Exactly right.”

***

Demeter says her goodbyes at the garden gate. “Think you can mind your mama for me, lil’ bit?”

“I mind her,” Makaria says with a smile sweet as syrup, hands gripped tight to the handle of her wagon, eyes already roaming down the red dirt road.

“Hmm. Mind your daddy, too. And come here and kiss me. I’ll be waiting come next spring.”

At her turn, Persephone wraps her arms around her ma, breathes in the smell of coffee steam and bacon-greased smoke trapped in Demeter’s hair. She feels the hard edges of her ma, the soft curves, too, feels the way her own body’s begun to soften in all the same places. Mirror-images, like. “I’ll write,” she promises.

“Sure you will,” says Demeter. She kisses Persephone’s cheek, then her forehead. “Don’t let that man give you no trouble.”

“You know I don’t.”

They set off together for another year, Persephone having to stop herself lingering every other step, Makaria tramping along, her attention fixed only on the road ahead. The wagon wheels squeak and rattle, catching on pebbles and ruts in the earth. They’ll be in town soon, plodding down main street—Demeter’s house stands not even half a mile outside the town proper—they’ll be waiting at the station, they’ll be in the train, rushing down to Hadestown. Persephone bears the going easier these days; she ain’t bearing it easy. She can’t. Hasn’t but for that first time, when she was young and dumb, Hades older than she and as dumb, if not dumber.

“Tell me how Daddy H brought you down to Hadestown,” Makaria asks every now and again, and when she does Persephone knows she’s been listening to her cousins, her aunts and uncles, all those stories that start with Persephone rosebud-fresh and innocent and end with the big bad man from the bottomlands come to spirit her away. A fossil, they call him up on the mountain, that old fossil buried for good yet, like being buried in the dirt’s turned him as good as dead.

Persephone used to believe them. Still does on occasion, which is likely why the question turns her so tart. “Your daddy didn’t bring me anywhere, I went. Went in my own sound mind, too.”

One day that won’t be enough. One day the girl will see her daddy as everyone else sees him, as Persephone sees him, and there ain’t much to be done about that, ain’t nothing at all to do but raise her up ‘till then, hope Makaria knows what and whom to believe. The heavy suitcases tug at the muscles of Persephone’s arms. The cool-edged sunlight prickles on her shoulders. She hoists her shoulders and the suitcases higher, calls, “Baby, try not to get so much dirt on your dress.”

Persephone brushes the worst of it off as soon as they reach the platform; Makaria squirms, whines, “It’s not dirty, Momma!” ‘till Persephone snaps, “Girl, want me to take a switch to you?” though she ain’t done so before and ain’t likely to do so ever. She dusts off her hands once Makaria’s scampered away, smells the dry sunlit whiff of the dirt still coating them. It’s got a different smell, a different feel, than the earth down below. Doesn’t weigh you down. Doesn’t sit cold and heavy, pressed into slabs thick as bricks.

“Momma.” After running the whole length of the platform Makaria scampers back, panting. She rummages in the wagon. “Where’d Granny put the sandwiches?”

What a body needs from time to time though, ain’t it? A little weight to hold you steady, a little cold in the heat of the day. Persephone reaches down and tucks a stray corkscrew curl behind Makaria’s ear. “You hungry, chickadee?”

“Starving!”

They have their lunch waiting on the station benches, jelly sandwiches oozing sticky in waxed paper, an old canning jar of clear water fresh from the garden pump. There’s a third sandwich set aside for Hermes, and a fourth for Hades, which he may or may not eat. If he won’t, Persephone guesses she’s got appetite enough for the both of them; she licks a smear of jelly from the corner of her lips, wipes Makaria’s face, sips the water and watches the world go by. Mortals, except for the station porters, mostly don’t hang around the platform this time of year. They know what’s coming. Some do make a point of walking past, tipping their hats or raising their hands and wishing her and the baby a good winter. “Good as I can make it,” Persephone promises them. She folds the squares of waxed paper and tucks them into their bag, sets the jar of water back in its place and remembers her moonshine and dandelion wine days, the bite of good liquor that used to carry her through these long waits. “Good as I can make it.”

“He’s coming,” Makaria says. Persephone’s had to call her back from the very edge of the platform lord knows how many times now. “Isn’t he coming?”

“Sure is.” She used to worry winters spent in Hadestown would turn their daughter spoiled, the cool glitter of the palace and the furnace-glow of the factories and mills ruining her for the dust and sweat and scraping by up top. They ain’t yet—for a while there the opposite near came true. Persephone trained Makaria out of diapers in Demeter’s house, in the cramped, dank old outhouse at the bottom of the garden. In the palace that winter the clanking of the water pipes and the roar of the flush toilet scared the girl half out of her wits. Persephone showed her how to use the toilet more than once; it was only when she got Hades to do the same that Makaria could perch on the cold porcelain seat without bursting into tears.

Grinning at the memory—afterwards Hades tried explaining the ins and outs of plumbing, prying the lid off the tank and lifting Makaria up so she could stare inside—Persephone doesn’t quite miss, but doesn’t quite catch, either, the thunder rolling off the tracks. Faraway, faint, growing closer by the minute. When the whistle calls out, shrill and piercing, she gets to her feet.

“It’s here.” Makaria dashes about, the wisp of her skirt fluttering like a puff of smoke. She plows into Persephone’s side and snatches her hand. “It’s here, he’s _here,”_ she breathes, squeezing with all her might.

“Told you, didn’t I?” Pulse beats fast in Persephone’s throat, and she swallows; suddenly seems as though the stickiness of the jelly still coats her tongue. “Stay back now. Wait ‘till it stops.”

The train to Hadestown’s an old one. Been years since its outwards matched the plush and gold filigree of its innards, but Makaria’s excitement as the creaking, belching bucket of bolts gains on the platform puts a fizz in Persephone’s blood, one that, before her daughter came along, she hadn’t felt for going on a century or more. Takes the right pair of eyes to see beauty in this thing, the right kind of heart to miss the man who rides it.

Brakes groan, gears squeal. Steam billows across the platform in hot, cottony drifts. Persephone feels Makaria’s grip loosen, her daughter’s hand slip off hers, and she grabs for it, too late. “What did I just say?”

“It stopped!” Already the girl’s lost in the haze. Her voice, shrill and piercing like the whistle: “Daddy, Daddy!”

“Lord help the man,” Persephone mutters. She raises her voice. “Don’t go climbing all over him. You know he’s got a bad back.” Bad knees, too, she thinks as hers pop when Persephone bends to lift the suitcases. The steam clears, blown to wandering tufts by a dusty breeze; she hears footsteps behind her. “That you, Hermes?”

He wiggles his way around her, light footed like a sparrow. “As far as I know. Let me take those off your hands, girl, c’mon.”

They swap cheek-kisses, their lips both smacking drily. Persephone’s belly, like it always does in the moments before she’s due to board the train, to see Hades again, curdles. Curdles with a feeling closer to anticipation and excitement than annoyance and resentment—or worse than those, dread—but not so different. “Been all right this summer?” she asks. “Ain’t been too bad?”

“Not too bad.” Hermes’ eyes twinkle. “He’ll be better now that you and the baby are back.”

Persephone nods and nudges the toy wagon with her foot. “There’s a sandwich for you in one of those bags, if you want it.” Then she smooths her hair, her skirt too, and goes to them, her husband and her baby.

Hades stands at the edge of the platform. Just disembarking, it looks like, when Makaria flung herself at him, clambering legs and clinging arms, skirt as wild a mess as the curly burst of her hair. She’s stuck on him now, legs latched around his side and rumpling the crisp pinstripes of his black vest. Mouth pressed to his ear, not bothering to whisper. Hades, his arms around her, listens, nods gravely, reaches down with one hand to gently pick something off the girl’s leg—a leaf, a scrap of the waxed paper—and flick it into the breeze.

“And Granny said I was the best at it she’d ever seen, better than Momma—”

“Mercy,” Persephone groans. “Is this about cutting up the peaches again?”

Makaria squirms ‘round to face her, doesn’t have the grace to look the least bit guilty. “Granny says I got a steady hand.”

“Your granny let you use a knife?” Hades asks.

He’s got his shades on, but they’ve never interfered with Persephone’s knowing exactly when his eyes are fixed on her. “I was hovering the entire time.”

“No you weren’t,” Makaria says. The coppery color of her hair flashes nearly golden next to Hades’ slicked-back white. “Momma doesn’t hover,” she tells him. “She watches.”

He smiles. His face creases parched and papery when he does. What is it about having a baby that sees them both growing a little older every time they meet? “What’s this I heard about my back?” Hades asks, and Makaria giggles and Persephone thinks, lord. Lord, man, how long’s it been since July?

She closes the breath of distance left between them, wraps her arms around him, and presses her cheek to his free shoulder, the one Makaria ain’t snuggled against. “I missed you,” she says, forcing herself to speak it clear when a good half of Persephone urges her to mumble those words, or better yet not say them at all. She wasn’t built for earnestness, it sometimes seems like. And look at her, married to this man who’s the quickest she’s ever known to root out a false word.

His arms full, Hades rests his chin on Persephone’s head. Puts her in mind of times when they were younger, soft-hearted and easier with each other, when she used to nestle close to Hades and listen to the deep bass grit rumbling from his chest, up through his throat. “Missed you too, songbird,” he says, quiet. “Missed you both.”

“Daddy H?” Makaria asks, squirming again.

“What, chickadee?”

For him, she preens. As much as Persephone uses it, “chickadee” is Hades’ name for Makaria, is and always will be. “Can I see your glasses?”

***

She fusses with them a good half hour of the way down to Hadestown, the stretch before the tracks run into the shade of the tunnels. Makaria sits in Hades’ lap, examining his glasses intently, peppering him with questions. What makes the glass dark? What makes glass? Why does the sun hurt his eyes so much?

Hades answers with patience stockpiled over his weeks spent alone, with real interest: they’re tinkerers, both of them. Stretched out on the opposite bench, halfway to a doze, Persephone watches their bent heads. She sees the sets of their jaws, identical, the careful, precise way Hades’ hands move and how Makaria strains to copy him. “Look at you. Two peas in a pod,” she says, yawning.

Hades raises his head. “Tired?” he asks.

“Ain’t you?”

“Momma didn’t want to get up this morning,” Makaria says. “But she told me a story.”

“Lunch just taking a while to digest,” Persephone says. She drums the fingers of her right hand on her belly. “All I need’s a minute to shut my eyes.”

Hades brushes Makaria’s stray curls off her forehead. “Take your time.”

“Well then, guess I will. Thank you muchly.”

As her eyes slide shut Persephone hears Makaria whisper, “Momma told a story about you.”

“Did she. Which one?” Hades says. Persephone doesn’t realize she’s braced for a barb of suspicion in the question ‘till she realizes there’s no barb to be found.

“How you picked my name,” says Makaria, a little louder. “Momma says if it weren’t for you I wouldn’t’ve got a name at all.”

“Does she,” says Hades, a little louder himself, and Persephone’s lips quirk. “I thought of your name,” he says, “but your momma knew it would fit you, that you’d be able to carry the weight of it.”

 _‘Blessed.’ Awful weighty, that._ “Lucky guess,” she says without opening her eyes. “Too bad we didn’t pick a middle name, just in case.”

“I don’t want a middle name!”

“Why not, baby? We could’ve picked you something real pretty. Eupheme...Elysia…”

“I hate Elysia,” Makaria protests. “Daddy—”

“We’re not naming you Elysia.” Hades sounds rueful. To Persephone he says, “Go to sleep.”

“I’m trying to, ain’t I?” Really, Persephone ain’t able to properly sleep on the train. The way’s too rattling-bumpy, too bright even after it plunges underground, thanks to the flickering lamps, and most times the feeling of open earth and open sky slipping away sticks to the back of her mind like a wad of chewing gum. She can’t help worrying at it. Dozing, her eyelids growing stiff and sticky, she lets Hades’ voice and Makaria’s blur to low notes and high. She slips into half-dreams muddled by the rock and groan of the coach, warm and covered all over in a pleasant fuzz like the skins of those summer peaches, the skin of her husband’s cheek rasping against hers.

A sudden weight clambers into her lap. “‘Bye, Momma,” Makaria says. Her breath is hot. It still smells a bit of the jelly sandwiches.

“Oof.” Persephone blinks. “Where you off to, girl? Give me a kiss.”

“Thought Makaria might like to get a look at the engine,” Hermes explains with a sly smile Persephone would return if her daughter weren’t inches from her face.

She does return the kiss, then licks her thumb to rub a smudge off the girl’s cheek. “Listen to your uncle.”

“Listen well,” Hades adds, as forbidding as only he can be. “Hermes tells you to do something—”

“I’ll do it.” Makaria slips off Persephone’s lap, slips away without a second thought. “‘Bye,” she repeats.

As the door slides shut Persephone feels her face break into a tired grin, slumps a little lower on the bench. “What’s it gonna be? I have to get up or are you gonna come to me?”

Hades gets up. The bench creaks as he settles beside her. “She’s growing fast.”

“I know. I know.” Carefully, Persephone stretches out ‘till she’s lying full-length on the bench, legs crossed at the ankle. She lays her head in her husband’s lap. “Handful of years and she’ll be doing up her face, chasing after some boy and cussing at me for wanting her home by midnight.”

“And me?” His hand drops heavily to the thicket of her hair.

“Now that I can’t rightly tell.” It’s good—a sight better than good—to feel the weight of his touch, Hades stroking down the curve of her ear. Persephone looks up at him. “Uncle Zeus wasn’t around much, you remember.” And never willing to play the part of her daddy when he was, though the same can be said of him with most all his brood. “But,” she says, “likely I would’ve hated him as much as I hated my ma. It’s the way of growing up, Hades. Can’t be helped.”

“Can’t it,” he says. Makaria must’ve taken the glasses with her; Hades gazes down at Persephone with bared, deep-set eyes. These days he doesn’t look unsure when he talks about their daughter—only like he’s somehow rowed himself halfway up a creek without a paddle. “Your mother and Zeus, they grew up alone. We all did.” He grunts, clears his throat. “Maybe now,” Hades says, “you and I can do better.”

“Maybe.” Thinking of Hades and thinking of her ma, thinking of how they both talk about what they’d rather not talk about, the past that left them shivering in the dark, scared by shadows on the walls of a cave, and thinking of the jars of jam Makaria’ll present to him like golden treasure, the summery sweetness he’ll savor for weeks like he never was able to in those days, Persephone’s filled with the kind of tenderness that plugs her throat like cotton. The kind that has her grappling for something else to say regardless, ‘cause she can’t bear it for any longer than a breath. “How’s the bar?” she asks. “How’s Eurydice?”

“Doing good business. She packs it to the rafters most nights.”

“And Orpheus?” Persephone feels the familiar curdling in her belly. “Any more word from him?”

“If there was,” says Hades, rough like he suspects she’s just needling him to admit it, “you’d be the first to know, not me.”

“True enough.”

He sighs. “I’d be the first to know,” Hades says, “if he’d stopped gallivanting around up top.”

“I wouldn’t call it gallivanting,” Persephone snaps.

The band of one of his rings brushes cool and heavy over her ear. “What did you expect me to do? I gave them a chance.”

Been years; still his voice weighs heavier than his touch when Hades talks of it. Figuring hers must weigh the same, she asks, “What did you expect him to do? He’s mortal. Half, anyway.”

“Men are fools.”

“Men are _frail,”_ she grumbles, nudging her head from side to side—truthfully, her husband’s lap ain’t a wholly satisfactory pillow. Bony in places, and too apt, like the rest of him, to tense right up whenever he’s feeling threatened. “Come on,” says Persephone, not quite worn out by the bickering but worn enough to set it aside for another day, leftover tenderness and their own mix of foolishness and frailty a rough warmth in her throat. “Come on down here and kiss me.” And Hades, once she’s risen up on her elbows to make the job easier on his back, does.

***

The baby was teething the first summer he visited. Hades and Persephone took turns walking up and down with her, rubbing chips of ice on her gums, and praying that the first tooth would break through before either of the two of them cracked the other’s skull with Demeter’s fireplace poker. Or could be that last was just Persephone. It wasn’t the noise that irritated her—not so much, anyway, as the fact that it stopped nearly, if not completely, whenever Hades held Makaria.

“She’s always been like this,” she complained. “I swear, baby, you were inside me nine months! Nine long months and—” she snapped her fingers “—quiet as a mouse in your arms.”

“You’re her mother.” It was a muggy night, the windows all thrown open, the two of them sitting on the back stoop with Makaria grizzling half-heartedly on Hades’ knee. “She won’t forget that.”

“Think she’ll forget you’re her daddy?” A firefly landed on Persephone’s arm, blinking lazily. She brushed it off. “You’re the one she’ll always come back to, I’m the one she’s stuck with season after season.”

They sat quiet after that, the fireflies swarming about and Hades bouncing his knee up and down ever so slightly. Up and down, up and down. Makaria hiccuped, half the fingers of her right hand lodged in her mouth. The fuzzy dark hair she’d been born with had fallen out a while back, and the fuzz growing in now was lighter by a couple shades, deep brown with an undertone of copper. “Your hair,” Hades had said when he first saw it, and Persephone had answered, “Nah, a shade lighter, I think,” grinning like a fox in a henhouse.

When they got up to go inside, the nighttime damp of the stoop stuck fast in their joints, another firefly lighted in her hair. Hades reached to pick it out, his fingers skimming over her temple, and said, “Persephone.”

“Hmm?”

“You’ll always be the one to bring her back.”

***

“Daddy?” Makaria has to climb over his lap in order to peer out the car’s dark-tinted window. “What are they building in the road?”

Persephone, as usual near-overwhelmed by the first few blasts of heat and brightness and machinery-roar, chimes in automatically with, “Looks like they’re laying down a trolley line, baby,” before glancing at Hades. “You’re putting in a trolley line?”

“We’ve got more families moving out to the Elysian Fields,” he says, looking out the window. “Riding a taxicab back and forth every day will bleed them dry.”

“Well, ain’t that awful generous.”

“Practical,” Hades grunts. “The trolleys’ll at least run on time.”

Persephone eyes the glass panel separating them from their driver. “Practical,” she echoes, “might clear up some traffic, too.”

“What’s a trolley? Is it like a train? The train’s better.”

“Not everyone can ride the train, chickadee,” Hades says.

Makaria, breath and fingers smearing the glass, asks, “Why not?”

He turns back to Persephone then, something twitching in the corners of his dour mouth, not a smile but something knowing—the question was bound to come, sooner or later. She thinks back to the creak of the bench, the rattling of the coach, the weight of that mouth on hers. “We’ll tell you when you’re older.”

 _“Momma.”_ But Hadestown is bright, booming, her daddy’s kingdom and hers too one day, and however fast she’s growing at the bottom of her heart Makaria is young yet, young enough to know she ain’t ready for them, those questions with no good answers.

**Author's Note:**

> Couple of quick notes:
> 
> 1.) The title’s inspired by lyrics in “Mystery Train” by Elvis. 
> 
> 2.) I mentioned Alcippe pretty much just because Alcippe the daughter of Ares (there are actually a couple Alcippes in Greek mythology) has a very tragic story, and I wanted to give her a future with a bit more hope. Also I’ll never not want to Hadestown-ify as many Greek myths as possible. 
> 
> 3.) Orpheus and Eurydice ended up being Mr. and Mrs. Not-Appearing-in-This-Fic for the most part, but I’ve possibly got one more fic set in this verse coming down the pipeline, and they’ll play bigger roles there.


End file.
